A couple of weeks ago, as I was visiting a hospitalized parishioner, I
couldn't help but take note of an appalling scenario that was playing
itself out on a nearby television screen, with the volume turned up to
the max: a helpless woman, bound and gagged and sobbing convulsively,
was being tortured by a muscle-bound thug who, as he stood by her
chair, was lightly "caressing" her neck with a sharp-edged knife, as
three of his confederates stood by, watching-they'd seen this sort of
thing before. A minute or so later, out of deference to my presence the
mute button was punched.

Since my television vigils are largely restricted to FOX News, I was
shocked. Do our laws permit the media to transmit - and during daytime
viewing hours to boot, providing easy access to unsupervised children -
such brutal representations of sadistic behavior? And could such
programming not easily incite in the mentally unstable the desire to
translate sadistic fantasy into real- world violence? Lee Kuan Yew, for
decades the prime minister of Singapore, and thus well versed in what
works and what doesn't in building a successful society, at the age of
89 has recently published a book of "Insights" in which he looks back
on his life and his achievement in transforming the city-state of
Singapore from a polity whose citizens in 1959 had a per capita yearly
income of $400 to today's dynamic republic with a per capita income of
more than $50,000. In this book he speaks with glowing admiration of
America's role in promoting a more prosperous and secure Asia and
indeed a more prosperous and secure world at large; but he also states his fear that internal
moral rot is eating away at the roots of our vitality: "To have, day to
day, images of violence and raw sex on the picture tube, the whole
society exposed to it, will ruin a whole community." [I am
indebted to Peggy Noonan for this citation]. Our friend from Singapore
is right.

And then there's the world of
video games, many of those in high demand designed to elicit a kind of
frenzied delight in spectacular destruction with more often than not,
added as a kind of bonus, an outright celebration of criminality -- cf.
"Grand Theft Auto" -- with no visible negative consequences
recoiling on the participants.

In a number of recent scholarly studies the alarm about such "games" is
being sounded, confirming with convincing evidence the verdict of
common sense embodied in the adage: "Monkey see, monkey do!" What we fill our minds with
sooner or later becomes what we do, in anecdotal confirmation of which
one might cite the recent news report that the father who last July in
River Falls, Wisconsin shot to death his three young daughters was a
fan of violent video games. So, too, in the related category of sex
crimes it is common knowledge that a post-event search of the
criminal's lodgings typically unearths a sizable cache of pornography.

One might ask further of those who assure us that what children and
teenagers watch on the screen has NO relation to what they do, just
what is the reason then for the ban, so dear to the "liberal" heart, on
displaying on the screen the act --
quelle horreur! -- of smoking! The
ancient Greeks, all too aware of their own proclivity for violence,
generally chose to prohibit in their theatres the ON-STAGE depiction of violence; when
the tragic plot demanded violence, the violence itself took place OFF-stage; it was REPORTED, NOT shown, though its
tragic aftermath, its
devastating impact on its victims, could
be presented visually, in the interests of evoking sympathy for the
victims and deterring such violence in future.

All of which brings to mind a curious aspect of President Obama's
campaign to reduce mass violence all but exclusively through
gun-control, namely: his
deafening silence vís-à-vís
the MAJOR contribution his Hollywood friends are making, day in and day
out, to intensifying the public's appetite for violence through the
escalating role of violence shown in their films. In witness
whereof check out any film by
Quentin Tarantino. And he's just the leader of the pack.

May I share with you here an
op-ed from- yes I can hear you saying "There he goes again!"- The Wall Street Journal for April
4th. The author is Campbell Brown, a former anchor for NBC News and
CNN.

*
*
*
* *

The
President Gives Hollywood a Pass on Violence By Campbell
Brown Wall Street
Journal, April 4, 2013

There was something missing from
President Obama's Wednesday speech in Denver about gun violence. He
focused almost exclusively on passing gun-control laws, and not at all
on one of the nation's biggest promoters of violence: the entertainment
industry.

The president's campaign against
gun violence has produced a stale debate marked by lots of speeches
with little achieved. A more creative chief executive would have used
this moment to widen the discussion by drawing attention to the
increasingly graphic violence so pervasive in television shows, movies
and video games. Mr. Obama is particularly well positioned to
challenge Hollywood because of his special relationship with the media
world's elites. They might be more likely to heed criticism coming from
Mr. Obama than from any other president or member of Congress.

In January, when announcing his
gun-violence task force, headed by Vice President Biden, Mr. Obama paid
lip service to the subject of media violence. The president's
gun-control plan, based on Mr. Biden's recommendations, addressed the
matter only by asking the Centers for Disease Control to "conduct
research on the causes and prevention of gun violence, including
links between video games, media
images, and violence." He asked Congress to allocate $10 million for
the research. In Washington terms that's a pittance.

Dr. Victor Strasberger, the
leading researcher on media violence for the American Academy of
Pediatrics, could tell the CDC and the President what to expect: "All
our studies show portraying violence is EXTREMELY dangerous," Dr.
Strasberger recently told me. "Kids become desensitized, numb to
suffering around them and aggressive." He also says that when you add
in other factors like poverty, abuse or mental illness, "you have a
perfect storm. This can and does lead to violence."

Dr. Strasberger says he was
stunned that the White House seems to have little interest in the
available evidence. On the subject of media violence, Mr. Biden met
ONLY with representatives of the entertainment and video game industry
and researchers who support the industry. Not a single doctor or
researcher CRITICAL of media violence met with the vice president.

That's a shame, since there is a
consensus among doctors and mental-health professionals about the danger to children from
exposure to the violence depicted by movies, television and video
games.

The American Academy of
pediatrics' 2009 policy statement said: "The evidence is now clear and
convincing: MEDIA violence is one of the CAUSAL factors of real-life
violence and aggression. Therefore, pediatricians and parents
need to take action." The American medical association's guide for
physicians says studies show "a clear
link between BRIEF exposure to violence on TV or movies and
increases in aggressive and even physically violent behavior in young
persons.

In 2011, the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
concluded that "hundreds of studies of the effects of TV violence
on children and teenagers have found that children may become 'immune'
or numb to the horror of violence, gradually accept violence as a way
to solve problems" and "imitate the violence they observe on
television."

Several POLICY changes could
make SIGNIFICANT strides
toward reducing young people's exposure to violence. One obvious action
would be to restrict violence on
television that can be seen by young people. Right now the Federal
Communications Commission has no rules regulating TV violence -
the agency's content regulations apply
only to language and sexual content. The FCC itself has recognized that
its inability to oversee violent content is a problem and in a 2007
report to Congress called for
changing the rules.

That same report, issued when the agency was headed by Kevin Martin, also called for an end to channel
"bundling" by cable and satellite companies, the practice of forcing
subscribers to pay for channels they don't watch. Parents should be
allowed to choose which cable or satellite channels - sources of the
most extreme content - come into their homes. Parents shouldn't be
obliged to act as the SOLE filters for the torrent of material, as they
are today blocking channels and password-protecting against the
ever-shifting programming.

Another helpful proposal would be to institute
a REAL movie ratings system. As anyone who has recently seen PG-13
movies knows, the level of violence in them has increased to the
point of making the Motion Picture Association of America's voluntary
rating system MEANINGLESS. Like the FCC's rules for television,
MPAA ratings emphasize sex and language over violence. The result?
Feature films like Vin Diesel's "Fast Five" - which includes people
being shot, blood spurting, necks being broken and horrific car crashes
- receive a PG-13.

The ratings system must put equal emphasis on VIOLENCE, with far tougher restrictions on
what defines a PG-13 film. Perhaps Mr. Obama or Mr. Biden should
have a word with their friend and former Senate pal Chris Dodd, now chairman of the MPAA.

The president has plenty of other influential friends in Hollywood.
According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Mr. Obama's
presidential campaign raised millions of dollars in direct donations
from the entertainment industry, and millions more for his Super Pac,
Priorities USA Action. Almost a third of the $1 million-plus donors to
the president's Super PAC were entertainment and media heavy-weights
including producers Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg. In one
Obama fundraiser alone, held at the home of George Clooney, the
campaign brought in an estimated $15 million.

The president has been more than
willing to challenge the National Rifle Association, but that is
like a Republican President standing up to labor unions-not a move that
risks anything with his core supporters. Mr. Obama could show some REAL bravery by
taking on Hollywood. Emphasis added].